Timothy Thomas "Tim" Powers (born February 29, 1952, in Buffalo, New York) is an American science fiction and fantasy author. Powers has won the World Fantasy Award twice for his critically acclaimed novels Last Call and Declare. His 1988 novel On Stranger Tides served as inspiration for the Monkey Island franchise of video games and was optioned for adaptation into the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film.Most of Powers' novels are "secret histories": he uses actual, documented historical events featuring famous people, but shows another view of them in which occult or supernatural factors heavily influence the motivations and actions of the characters.Typically, Powers strictly adheres to established historical facts. He reads extensively on a given subject, and the plot develops as Powers notes inconsistencies, gaps and curious data; regarding his award-winning 2000 novel Declare, Powers stated,"I made it an ironclad rule that I could not change or disregard any of the recorded facts, nor rearrange any days of the calendar – and then I tried to figure out what momentous but unrecorded fact could explain them all."
Compared to fantasy, science fiction is almost a branch of mainstream. Fantasy is based on things that are logically impossible, going in directions that apparently can't exist. Let's say mainstream fiction would be a straight, one-dimension high-speed highway rushing along between trees. Fantasy is more like a perpendicular look down a corridor of trees to a clearing. It's rotating 90°, it's a fresh dimension - and it's that perpendicular look, that dislocation or vertigo or disorientation that's the fun. It doesn't so much matter what's in the clearing over there, whether it's a unicorn or Cthulhu; it's the fact of the new dimension. The attraction of fantasy is experiencing the impossible as real, but we wouldn't bother to do it if there wasn't a kind of resonance that happens in our heads too, if there wasn't this wiring in our heads that, like an induction coil, picks up a current from it. There has to be a response in the reader's head, which implies that Jungian archetypes are in some sense real.
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I suppose that what September 11th did was not so much change how we think of the world or humanity as remind us of a lot of things we already knew about humanity. (We could have done without the reminder.) It reminds us that any time of peace and prosperity is a fortunate exception to the way the machinery ordinarily works, and in retrospect it makes you appreciate that time.
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Fact
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Novel, 'Last Call', was optioned by FreakShowFilms in 2000.
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Powers is famous for his knotty plots, his remarkable erudition, his exhaustive research into historical detail (every one of which, evidently, finds a home in his fiction), his specializing in the Romantic Poets and Arthuriana, his ebullient capacity for writing fantasy, science fiction, and horror - but is most loved because he creates totally believable characters and suspenseful, truly WEIRD action-adventure.
$600,000
